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THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

AN INTERVIEW WITH 

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 

BY 

EDWARD MARSHALL 



Reprinted from The New York Times of October i8, 1914 



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COLUMOUi ictlOSIAi. LIBRARY 

r:3 1 - 1915 ' 

U. S. A. 

By Transfer 

JUL 12 1917 

ADDITIONAL COPIES MAY BE HAD ON APPLICATION TO 

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THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 

AN INTERVIEW WITH 

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 

BY 

EDWARD MARSHALL 

Reprinted from The New York Times of October i8, 1914- 



The United States of Europe. 

Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia 
University, firmly believes that the organization of 
such a federation will be the outcome, soon or late, 
of a situation built up through years of European 
failure to adjust government to the growth of 
civilization. 

He thinks it possible that the ending of the present 
war may see the rising of the new sun of democracy 
to light a day of freedom for our transatlantic neigh- 
bors. 

He tells me that thinking men in all the contend- 
ing nations are beginning vividly to consider such a 
contingency, to argue for it or against it ; in other 
words, to regard it as an undoubted possibility. 

Dr. Butler's acquaintance among those thinking 
men of all shades of political belief is probably wider 
than that of any other American, and it is significant 
of the startling importance of what he says that by 
far the greater number of his European friends, the 
men upon whose views he has largely, directly or 
indirectly, based his conclusions, are not of the 
socialistic or of any other revolutionary or semi- 
revolutionary groups, but are among the most con- 

[3] 



servative and most important figures in European 
political, literary and educational fields. 

This being unquestionably true, it is by no means 
improbable that in the interview which follows, fruit 
of two evenings in Dr. Butler's library, may be 
found the most important speculative utterance yet 
to appear in relation to the general European war. 

Dr. Butler's estimate of the place which the United 
States now holds upon the stage of the theatre of 
world progress and his forecast of the tremendously 
momentous role which she is destined to play 
there must make every American's heart first swell 
with pride and then thrill with a realization of 
responsibility. 

The United States of Europe, modeled after and 
instructed by the United States of America! The 
thought is stimulating. 

Said Dr. Butler: 

*'The European cataclysm puts the people of the 
United States in a unique and tremendously impor- 
tant position. As neutrals we are able to observe 
events and to learn the lesson that they teach. If 
we learn rightly we shall gain for ourselves and be 
able to confer upon others benefits far more impor- 
tant than any of the material advantages which may 
come to us through a shrewd handling of the new 
possibilities in international trade. 

" I hesitate to discuss any phase of the great con- 
flict now raging in Europe. By today's mail, for 
example, I received long, personal letters from Lord 
Haldane, from Lord Morley, from Lord Weardale, 
and from Lord Bryce. Another has just come from 
Prof. Schiemann of Berlin, perhaps the Emperor's 
most intimate adviser; another from Prof. Lammasch 
of Austria, who was the Presiding Judge of the 
British-American arbitration in relation to the New- 

[4] 



foundland fisheries a few years ago, and who is a 
member of the Austrian House of Peers. Still others 
are from M. Ribot, Minister of Finance in France, 
and M. d'Estournelles de Constant. These confi- 
dential letters give a wealth of information as to 
the intellectual and political forces that are behind 
the conflict. 

" You will understand, then, that without disloyalty 
to my many friends in Europe, I could not discuss 
with freedom the causes or the progress of the war, 
or speculate in detail about the future of the Euro- 
pean problem. My friends in Germany, France, and 
England all write to me with the utmost freedom and 
not for the public eye ; so you see that my great 
difficulty, when you ask me to talk about the mean- 
ing of the struggle, arises from the obligation that I 
am under to preserve a proper personal reserve 
regarding the great figures behind the vast intellec- 
tual and political changes which are really in the 
background of the war. 

"If such reserve is necessary in my case, it seems 
to me that it also is necessary for the country as a 
whole. The attitude of the President has been 
impeccable. That of the whole American press and 
people should be the same. 

** Especially is it true that all Americans who hope 
to have influence, as individuals, in shaping the events 
which will follow the war, must avoid any expression 
which even might be tortured into an avowal of 
partisanship or final judgment. 

" Even the free expression of views criticising 
particular details of the war, which might, in fact, 
deserve criticism, may destroy one's chance of 
future possible usefulness. A statement which might 
be unquestionably true may also be remembered to 
the damage of some important cause later on. 

[5] 



** There are reasons why my position is, perhaps, 
more difficult than that of some others. Talking is 
often a hazardous practice, and never more so than 
now. 

" The world is at the crossroads, and everything 
may depend upon the United States, which has been 
thrust by events into a unique position of moral 
leadership. Whether the march of the future is to 
be to the right or to the left, uphill or down, after 
the war is over, may well depend upon the course 
this nation shall then take, and upon the influence 
which it shall exercise. 

" If we keep our heads clear there are two things 
that we can bring insistently to the attention of 
Europe — each of vast import at such a time as that 
which will follow the ending of the war. 

"The first of these is the fact that race antago- 
'^nisms tend to die away and disappear under the influ- 
ence of liberal and enlightened political institutions. 
This has been proved in the United States. 

" We have huge Celtic, Latin, Teutonic and Slavic 
populations all living here at peace and in harmony ; 
and, as years pass, they tend to merge, creating new 
and homogeneous types. The Old World antago- 
nisms have become memories. This proves that such 
antagonisms are not mysterious attributes of geogra- 
phy or climate, but that they are the outgrowth 
principally of social and political conditions. Here 
a man can do about what he likes, so long as he does 
not violate the law ; he may pray as he pleases or not 
at all, and he may speak any language that he chooses. 

"The United States is itself proof that most of 

V the contentions of Europeans as to race antagonisms 

'' are ill-founded. We have demonstrated that racial 

antagonisms need not necessarily become the basis 

of permanent hatred and an excuse for war. 

[6] 



"If human beings are given the chance they will 
make the most of themselves, and, by living happily 
— which means by living at peace — they will avoid 
conflict. The hyphen tends to disappear from 
American terminology. The German-American, the 
Italo-American, the Irish- American all become 
Americans. 

" So, by and large, our institutions have proved 
their capacity to amalgamate and to set free every 
type of human being which thus far has come under 
our flag. There is in this a lesson which may well 
be taken seriously to heart by the leaders of opinion 
in Europe when this war ends. 

"The second thing which we may, with propriety, 
press upon the attention of the people of Europe 
after peace comes to them, is the fact that we are not 
only the great exponents, but the great example, of 
the success of the principle of federation in its appli- 
cation to unity of political life regardless of local, 
economic and racial differences. 

" If our fathers had attempted to organize this 
country upon the basis of a single, closely unified 
State, it would have gone to smash almost at the 
outset, wrecked by clashing economic and personal 
interests. Indeed, this nearly happened in the civil 
war, which was more economic than political in its 
origin. 

" But, though we had our difficulties, we did find 
a way to make a unified nation of a hundred million 
people and forty-eight commonwealths, all bound 
together in unity and in loyalty to a common politi- 
cal ideal and a common political purpose. / 

" Just as certainly as we sit here this must and will ^ 
be the future of Europe. There willbe a federation I 
into the United States of Europe. 

" When one nation sets out to assert itself by 

[7] 



force against the will, or even the wish, of its neigh- 
bors, disaster must inevitably come. Disaster would 
have come here if, in 1789, New York had endeav- 
ored to assert itself against New England or 
Pennsylvania. 

"As a matter of fact certain inhabitants of Rhode 
Island and Pennsylvania did try something of the 
sort after the Federal Government had been formed, 
but, fortunately, their effort was a failure. 

" The leaders of our national life had established 
such a flexible and admirable plan of government 
that it was soon apparent that each State could 
retain its identity, forming its own ideals and shaping 
its own progress, and still remain a loyal part of the 
whole ; that each State could make a place for itself 
in the new federation and not be destroyed thereby. 

"There is no reason why each nation in Europe 
should not make a place for itself in the sun of unity 
\ which I am sure is rising there behind the war clouds. 
Europe's stupendous economic loss, which already 
has been appalling and will soon be incalculable, will 
give us an opportunity to press this argument home. 

" True internationalism is not the enemy of the 
nationalistic principle. On the contrary, it helps 
true nationalism to thrive. The Vermonter is more 
a Vermonter because he is an American, and there 
is no reason why Hungary, for example, should 
not be more than ever before Hungarian after it 
becomes a member of the United States of Europe. 

'* Europe, of course, is not without examples of the 
successful application of the principle of federation 
within itself. It so happens that the federated State 
next greatest to our own is the German Empire. It 
is only forty-three years old, but there federation has 
been notably successful. So the idea of federation 
is familiar to German publicists. 

[8] 



" It is familiar, also, to the English and has lately 
been pressed there as the probable final solution of 
the Irish question. 

" It has insistently suggested itself as the solution 
of the Balkan problem. 

" In a lesser way it already is represented in the 
structure of Austria-Hungary. 

"This principle of nation building, of international 
building through federation, certainly has in it the 
seeds of the world's next great development — and 
we Americans are in a position both to expound the 
theory and to illustrate the practice. It seems to me 
that this is the greatest work which America will 
have to do at the end of this war. 

** These are the things which I am writing to my 
European correspondents in the several belligerent 
countries by every mail. 

" The cataclysm is so awful that it is quite within 
the bounds of truth to say that on July 31 the 
sun went down upon a world which never will be 
seen again. 

" This conflict is the birth-throe of a new European 
order of things. The man who attempts to judge 
the future by the old standards or to force the future 
back to them will be found to be hopelessly out of 
date. The world will have no use for him. The 
world has left behind forever the international poli- 
cies of Palmerston and of Beaconsfield and even those 
of Bismarck, which were far more powerful. 

"When the war ends, conditions will be such that 
a new kind of imagination and a new kind of states- 
manship will be required. This war will prove to be 
the most effective education of 500,000,000 people 
which could possibly have been thought of, although 
it is the most costly and most terrible means which 
could have been chosen. The results of this educa- 

[9] 



tion will be shown, I think, in the process of general 
reconstruction which will follow. 

" All the talk of which we hear so much about the 
peril from the Slav or from the Teuton or from the 
Celt is unworthy of serious attention. It would be 
quite as reasonable to discuss seriously the red- 
headed peril or the six-footer peril. 

*' There is no peril to the world in the Slav, the 
Teuton, the Celt or any other race, provided the 
people of that race have an opportunity to develop 
as social and economic units, and are not bottled up 
so that an explosion must come. 

"It is my firm belief that nowhere in the world, from 

Y this time on, will any form of government be tolerated 

which does not set men free to develop in this fashion." 

I asked Dr. Butler to make some prognostication 
of what the United States of Europe, which he so 
confidently expects, will be. He answered : 

" I can say only this : The international organiza- 
tion of the world already has progressed much far- 
ther than is ordinarily understood. Ever since the 
Franco-Prussian war and the Geneva Arbitration, 
both landmarks in modern history, this has advanced 
inconspicuously, but by leaps and bounds. 

"The postal service of the world has been inter- 
nationalized in its control for years. The several 
Postal Conventions have given evidences of an inter- 
national administrative organization of the highest 
order. 

" Europe abounds in illustrations of the inter- 
national administration of large things. The very 
laws of war, which are at present the subject of so 
much and such bitter discussion, are the result of 
international organization. 

"They were not adopted by a Congress, a Parlia- 
ment, or a Reichstag. They were agreed to by 

[lo] 



many and divergent peoples, who sent representatives 
to meet for their discussion and determination. 

" In the admiralty law we have a most striking 
example of uniformity of practice in all parts of the 
world. If a ship is captured or harmed in the Far 
East and taken into Yokohama or Nagasaki, dam- 
ages will be assessed and collected precisely as they 
would be in New York or Liverpool. 

" The world is gradually developing a code for 
international legal procedure. Special arbitral tri- 
bunals have tended to merge and grow into the 
international court at The Hague, and that, in turn, 
will develop until it becomes a real supreme judicial 
tribunal. 

** Of course the analogy with the federated State 
fails at some points, but I believe the time will come 
when each nation will deposit in a world federation 
some portion of its sovereignty. 

"When this occurs we shall be able to establish an 
international executive and an international police, 
both devised for the especial purpose of enforcing 
the decisions of the international court. 

*' Here, again, we offer a perfect object lesson. 
Our central Government is one of limited and defined 
powers. Our history can show Europe how such 
limitations and definitions can be established and 
interpreted, and how they can be modified and 
amended when necessary to meet new conditions. 

"My colleague. Prof. John Bassett Moore, is now 
preparing and publishing a series of annotated 
reports of the decisions of the several international 
arbitration tribunals, in order that the Governments 
and jurists of the world may have at hand, as they 
have in the United States Supreme Court reports, a 
record of decided cases, which, when the time comes, 
may be referred to as precedents. 



"It will be through gradual processes such as this 
that the great end will be accomplished. Beginning 
with such annotated reports as a basis for precedents, 
each new case tried before this tribunal will add a 
further precedent, and, presently, a complete inter- 
national code will be in existence. It was in this 
way that the English common law was built, and 
such has been the history of the admirable work 
done by our own judicial system. 

"The study of such problems as these is at this 
time infinitely more important than the consideration 
of how large a fine shall be inflicted by the victors 
upon the vanquished. 

"There is the probability of some dislocation of 
territory and some shiftings of sovereignty after the 
war ends, but these will be of comparatively minor 
importance. The important result of this great war 
will be the stimulation of international organization 
along some such lines as I have suggested. 

" Dislocation of territory and the shifting of 
sovereigns as the result of international disagree- 
ments are mediaeval practices. After this war the 
world will want to solve its problems in terms of the 
future, not in those of the outgrown past. 

"Conventional diplomacy and conventional states- 
manship have very evidently broken down in Europe. 
They have made a disastrous failure of the work 
with which they were intrusted. They did not and 
could not prevent the war because they knew and 
used only the old formulas. They had no tools for 
a job like this. 

" A new type of international statesman is certain 
to arise, who will have a grasp of new tendencies, a 
new outlook upon life. Bismarck used to say that it 
would pay any nation to wear the clean linen of a 
civilized State. The truth of this must be taught to 

[12] 



those nations of the world which are weakest in 
morale, and it can only be done, I suppose, as similar 
work is accomplished with individuals. Courts, not 
killings, have accomplished it with individuals. 

"One more point ought to be remembered. We 
sometimes hear it said that nationalism, the desire 
for national expression by each individual nation, 
makes the permanent peace and good order of the 
world impossible. 

"To me it seems absurd to believe that this is any 
truer of nations than it is of individuals. It is not 
each nation's desire for national expression which" 
makes peace impossible ; it is the fact that thus far 
in the world's history such desire has been bound up 
with militarism. 

" The nation whose frontier bristles with bayonets 
and with forts is like the individual with a magazine 
pistol in his pocket. Both make for murder. Both 
in their hearts really mean murder. 

" The world will be better when the nations invite 
the judgment of their neighbors and are influenced 
by it. 

"When John Hay said that the Golden Rule and 
the Open Door should guide our new diplomacy, he 
said something which should be applicable to the 
new diplomacy of the whole world. The Golden 
Rule and a free chance are all that any man ought to 
want or ought to have, and they are all that any 
nation ought to want or ought to have. 

" One of the controlling principles of a democratic 
State is that its military and naval establishments 
must be completely subservient to the civil power. 
They should form the police, and not be the dominant 
factor of any national life. 

** As soon as they go beyond this simple function in 
any nation, then that nation is afflicted with militarism. 

[13] 



" It is difficult to make predictions of the war's 
effect on us. As I see it, our position will depend a 
good deal upon the outcome of the conflict, and 
what that will be no one at present knows. 

" If a new map of Europe follows the war, its per- 
manence will depend upon whether or not the 
changes are such as will permit nationalities to organ- 
ize as nations. 

" The world should have learned through the 
lessons of the past that it is impossible permanently 
and peacefully to submerge large bodies of aliens if 
they are treated as aliens. That is the opposite of the 
mixing process which is so successfully building a na- 
tion out of varied nationalities in the United States. 

"The old Romans understood this. They per- 
mitted their outlying vassal nations to speak any 
language they chose and to worship whatever god 
they chose, so long as they recognized the sover- 
eignty of Rome. When a conquering nation goes 
beyond that, and begins to suppress religions, lan- 
guages, and customs, it begins, at that very moment, 
to sow the seeds of insurrection and revolution. 

*' My old teacher and colleague. Professor Burgess, 
once defined a nation as an ethnographic unit 
inhabiting a geographic unit. That is an illuminating 
definition. If a nation is not an ethnographic unit, 
it tries to become one by oppressing or amalgamating 
the weaker portions of its people. If it is not a 
geographic unit, it tries to become one by reaching 
out to a mountain chain or to the sea — to something 
which will serve as a real dividing line between it and 
its next neighbors. 

" The accuracy of this definition can hardly be 
denied, and we all know what the violations of this 
principle have been in Europe. It is unnecessary 
for me to point them out. 

[14] 



" Races rarely have been successfully mixed by 
conquest. The military winner of a war is not 
always the real conqueror in the long run. The 
Normans conquered Saxon England, but Saxon law 
and Saxon institutions worked up through the new 
power and have dominated England's later history. 
The Teutonic tribes conquered Rome, but Roman 
civilization, by a sort of capillary attraction, went up 
into the mass above and presently dominated the 
Teutons. 

" The persistency of a civilization may well be 
superior in tenacity to mere military conquest and 
control. 

"The smallness of the number of instances in 
which conquering nations have been able success- 
fully to deal with alien peoples is extraordinary. 
The Romans were usually successful, and England 
has been successful with all but the Irish, but per- 
haps no other peoples have been successful in high 
degree in an effort to hold alien populations as 
vassals and to make them really happy and com- 
fortable as such. 

" One of the war's chief effects on us will be to 
change our point of view. Europe will be more 
vivid to us from now on. There are many public 
men who have never thought much about Europe, 
and who have been far from a realization of its actual 
importance to us. It has been a place to which to 
go for a Summer holiday. 

" But, suddenly, they find they cannot sell their 
cotton there or their copper, that they cannot market 
their stocks and bonds there, that they cannot send 
money to their families who are traveling there, 
because there is a war. To such men the war must 
have made it apparent that interdependence among 
nations is more than a mere phrase. 

[15] 



"All our trade and all our economic and social 
policies must recognize this. The world has discov- 
ered that money without credit means little. One 
cannot use money if one cannot use one's credit to 
draw it whenever and wherever needed. Credit is 
intangible and volatile, and may be destroyed over 
night. 

" I saw this in Venice. 

"On July 31 I could have drawn every cent that 
my letter of credit called for up to the time the 
banks closed. At 10 o'clock in the morning on 
August I I could not draw the value of a postage 
stamp. 

"Yet the banker in New York who issued my 
letter of credit had not failed. His standing was as 
good as ever it had been. But the world's system 
of international exchange of credit had suffered a 
stroke of paralysis over night. 

"This realization of international interdependence, 
I hope, will elevate and refine our patriotism by 
teaching men a wider sympathy and a deeper under- 
standing of other peoples, nations, and languages. 
I sincerely hope it will educate us up to what I have 
called 'The International Mind.' 

"When Joseph Chamberlain began his campaign 
after returning from South Africa, his keynote was, 
' Learn to think imperially.' I think our keynote 
should be, ' Learn to think internationally,' to see 
ourselves not in competition with the other peoples 
of the world, but working with them toward a 
common end, the advance of civilization. 

" There are hopeful signs, even in the midst of 
the gloom that hangs over us. Think what it has 
meant for the great nations of Europe to have come 
to us, as they have done, asking our favorable public 
opinion. We have no army and navy worthy of 

[16] 



their fears. They can have been induced by nothing 
save their conviction that we are the possessors of 
sound political ideals and a great moral force in the 
world. 

" In other words, they do not want us to fight for 
them, but they do want us to approve of them. They 
want us to pass judgment upon the humanity and 
the legality of their acts, because they feel that our 
judgment will be the judgment of history. There is 
a lesson in this. 

" If we had not repealed the Panama Canal Tolls 
Exemption act last June they would not have come 
to us as they are doing now. Who would have 
cared for our opinion in the matter of a treaty viola- 
tion if, for mere financial interest or from sheer 
vanity, we ourselves had violated a solemn treaty? 

" When Congress repealed the Panama Canal 
Tolls Exemption act it marked an epoch in the his- 
tory of the United States. This did more than the 
Spanish War, more than the building of the Panama 
Canal, or than anything else I can think of to make 
us a true world power. 

" As a nation we have kept our word when sorely 
tempted to break it. We made Cuba independent, 
we have not exploited the Philippines, we have stood 
by our word as to Panama Canal tolls. 

"In consequence we are the first moral power in 
the world today. Others may be first with armies, 
still others first with navies. But we have made 
good our right to be appealed to on questions of 
national and international morality. That Europe 
is seeking our favor is the acknowledgment of this 
fact by the European nations and their tribute to it." 



[17] 



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